Editorial for 24 August: A real danger to democracy

North Side MLA Ezzard Miller used a good portion of his allotted time on a local radio talk show Tuesday to criticize the Caymanian Compass, particularly our editorials this week and a story written for the Tuesday newspaper.

In one editorial, we chastised Mr. Miller for public rumour mongering about the Cayman Enterprise City project without checking with the developer, but relying on some anonymous source. In Tuesday’s editorial we commented about exaggerated claims by Mr. Miller and some People’s Progressive Party members that not answering their parliamentary questions or hearing their private members’ motions was threatening democracy in the Cayman Islands. Interestingly, we never said their motions and questions shouldn’t be addressed; only that they were exaggerating their importance.

We should point out that editorials are the opinion of this newspaper and we don’t expect everyone to agree with them. Indeed, the whole point of most of our editorials is simply to provoke thought and encourage discourse on a particular issue.

Ironically, Mr. Miller wrote a letter to the editor last week chastising Premier McKeeva Bush for calling us at the Caymanian Compass devil worshipers, drunkards and heretics because we disagreed with something the government did. Now that we’ve written two editorials critical of him, Mr. Miller took to the airwaves and in a vague, rambling summary of his complaints against us, called into question our ethics.

As far as we’re concerned, Mr. Bush’s and Mr. Miller’s comments about our editorials were equally ill-conceived and mean spirited. It seems Mr. Miller is happy for us to criticise his political opponents, but if we criticise him, we’re apparently unethical.

But we are quite used to such behaviour from Mr. Miller. While he may try to position himself as the defender of righteousness in the Legislative Assembly, we have not forgotten that it was Mr. Miller who brought a motion to have one of our reporters and this newspaper criminally prosecuted because he didn’t like a story we had written. This, in our opinion, was more dangerous to a free press and democracy than Mr. Bush calling us names will ever be.

1 COMMENT

Hang tough Cayman Compass, Ezzard is cut from the same cloth as McKeeva and does not take criticism well. I stopped listening to his rants on the radio as I found them to be offensive. I support your editorial freedom, it is important to the country.